Mary Lou Zoback
Mary Lou Zoback (born Mary Lou Chetlain on July 5, 1952) is an American geophysicist and seismologist who studies how the Earth's crust is stressed and how earthquakes happen. She spent most of her career at the United States Geological Survey (USGS). From 1986 to 1992, she led the World Stress Map project, a global effort to map tectonic stress in the Earth's lithosphere. She also served on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board from 2012 to 2018, helping oversee science for nuclear waste disposal.
Zoback grew up in Sanford, Florida. Her father was a sports editor, and as a teenager she helped operate a ballpark scoreboard during spring training. She started studying oceanography at Florida Tech but switched to Stanford after meeting geophysicist Allan Cox. She earned a BS in 1974, an MS in 1975, and a PhD in 1978 in geophysics; her doctoral thesis explored mid-Miocene rifting in northern Nevada.
After a brief postdoc with the NRC, she joined the USGS in 1979 as a research geophysicist and helped create maps of tectonic stress in the Western United States, eventually expanding to a continental map. She held several leadership roles, including chief scientist of the USGS Earthquake Hazards Team in 1999 and Senior Research Scientist from 2002 to 2006. She also worked in the private sector as VP for Earthquake Risk Applications at Risk Management Solutions from 2006 to 2011, and later served as a consulting professor at Stanford.
In 2012, President Obama appointed her to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Her research focuses on active tectonics—how stress fields relate to earthquakes—especially in the San Andreas Fault system, the Basin and Range Province, and intraplate regions. She also works on quantifying natural hazard risks and how to reduce disasters. She is married to geophysicist Mark David Zoback; they have two children.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:42 (CET).